I was convinced Total War: Empire was going to be a game-changer. A Total War in the age of muskets, with naval battles and a map that would let us fight across the world—how could it be anything less than amazing? Unfortunately, it didn't live up to those admittedly big expectations when it launched in 2009. It was rough and buggy, the naval battles couldn't hold a candle to the ones on land, and the scale was just too much.
What it was, though, was incredibly ambitious, and unlike any of the Total Wars that had come before. Now that I've put some distance—14 years—between me and that initial disappointment, I find myself a lot less critical of the risks Creative Assembly took. And now that it's just received its first update in years, which should improve performance on modern PCs while also fixing an issue that affected 12th gen Intel CPUs, maybe it's time to take it for another spin.
